DEAR TWITTER: Don't Mean To Be Rude, But Maybe It's Time To Hire A Full-Time Product Guy?

It's hard to find anyone anywhere who has anything
less-than-glowing to say about Jack Dorsey, the entrepreneur who invented
Twitter and another red-hot company
called Square and is now Twitter's product guru.

And it is Jack's obvious brilliance, work ethic, and
product-design chops that are always cited whenever anyone asks
why a company like Twitter, with nearly 1,000 employees, a ~$10
billion valuation, and all the cash in the world has to settle
for having a part-time product guy.

Because that, of course, is what Jack is at Twitter--a part-time
product guy.

Jack's other job, CEO of Square, commands at least half of his
work attention. Jack, legendarily, lives right between Twitter
and Square, and he spends one shift at Twitter and the next shift
at Square.

And of course Jack
works 80 hours a week minimum, this story goes, so it's not
really like Twitter is having to settle for having a
part-time product guy. It's more like Twitter and Square both
have absolutely amazing full-time product guys.

And it seems safe to say that either Twitter or Square would be
getting twice as much out of their product chief if Jack were
only working one job--if not more.

Why?

Well, because if there's one thing that just about everyone who
has ever accomplished anything amazing in life agrees upon, it's
that obsessive focus is key to success.

Splitting your time between two completely different companies is
the opposite of focus, no matter how talented you are. And
pretending that you can do each of these jobs as well as you
would if you only had one of them is not just dreamy--it's
delusional.

Now, it's possible that Jack is such an amazing product genius
that his half-time effort is better than anyone else's full-time
effort, but this seems unlikely. There are a lot of smart,
talented product people out there.

And it is very much worth noting that, even if Jack IS the next
Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs did not
split his time between two companies, at least not for long. When
Steve got canned from Apple, he went off and founded NEXT. Then,
later, for a brief period, he bought Pixar and ran that while also running NEXT. But
soon after he rejoined Apple, he focused on one thing... Apple.

And if Steve hadn't done that--if, instead, Steve had spent half
his week at Pixar and half at Apple--I'd bet good money that
Apple wouldn't be anywhere near where it is today.

In any event, the proof is in the pudding. Jack has now been
doing his two part-time jobs for more than a year. So we can look
at Twitter's product and success and see how he's doing.

So, how's Jack doing?

Well, officially, everyone raves about the amazing leadership and
influence Jack has had at Twitter, and everyone gushed all over
some of the recent product innovations Twitter announced under
Jack's leadership.

But I have to say this.

As a massively heavy Twitter user, the recent changes that
Twitter has made to my Twitter-app--TweetDeck--have been all
for the worse.

My old TweetDeck for iPhone stopped working, so I had to upgrade to
the new one. Yes, it's buggy and crash-prone, but the old version
had that problem, too. But it's the "improvements" to the new
version of the TweetDeck app that bug me the most. I won't
chronicle them here, but suffice it to say that I don't like
them. The new version of TweetDeck is now less-intuitive and
harder to use than the old one. And I'm holding Jack responsible
for that.

And then there's the steady stream of Twitter complaints I see on
Twitter about the new Twitter.com. I don't use Twitter.com myself
much, so I'm no authority there, but aside from the usual
hosannahs from the techo-chamber, I don't see a lot of folks who
are thrilled with it.

And, lastly, there's Twitter's new vision.

I saw Jack speak in Germany recently. He was as articulate and
charming and suave as always, and, thankfully, he doesn't appear
to have let the whole "next Steve Jobs" thing go to his head.
(It's not Jack's fault that people have beatified him.) But the
new vision Jack laid out for Twitter just wasn't very coherent.

And I have no doubt that some normal people might do
that. But, anecdotally at least, that does not, in fact, seem to
be the way normal people are using Twitter.

The way normal people are using Twitter, it seems, is to follow
celebrities and yak together about things that are being shown
right then on TV (like the Super Bowl). And that's very different
than turning to Twitter as a news source, which seems to be part
of the new Twitter vision.

In support of this, check out this chart from a
recent Pew study on where folks get news about the
Presidential campaign. Only 2% of people turn to Twitter for
news. That's not a whole lot of people for a company with 50
million daily users that is staking at least part of its future
vision on news.

Yes, I understand that lots of people use Twitter via apps, but
not everyone. And Twitter has put a lot of effort into
redesigning its Twitter.com page, which I doubt Twitter would
have done if only a tiny fraction of its users ever used it.

So I still think this low monthly usage of Twitter is startling.
And concerning.

And it leads me back to the point I was making at the beginning.

Twitter's product direction is confusing to me. In many ways, it
seems to be getting worse, not better.

And Twitter's vision of itself is also confusing to me. It's
vague, and it doesn't seem to line up with how normal people are
actually using the service.

And I can't help but wonder if part of the reason why Twitter's
product and vision seem confusing is that Twitter's product guy
is only working part-time.

So might it not finally be time for Twitter to consider hiring a
full-time product guy?